Lost Man's River

by Peter Matthiessen

  Rising to his feet, the Indian cast that money down with a great shout of contempt. Only then did he see that this frogskin was a century note, a hundred-dollar bill. Enraged, he went storming off the roof and down the fire stairs, reaching the bottom floor, still shouting, before it came to him why Indians so rarely got ahead in life, or even home. True, he had made some sort of moral point, but what good would that do him or his lost people? With not one penny in his pocket, nothing left him but his pride, he booted the fire door and banged out into the street, hoping his brave repudiation of white-man corruption would ring forever in that old man’s ears.

  Down from the heavens came a shrill whistle—like the voice of an eagle, Billie Jimmie said. He looked up in time to see the old man peering down over the roof edge. With the sun behind his head, his silver hair burned like a halo on the summer blue. “Looked like the Great Spirit,” the Indian said, still reverential. For between the old man’s eyes and his own, a leaf-like thing was lilting downward, downward on the eddying breeze.

  A moment later, the burning halo disappeared, the sky was empty, there was only that crisp ticket to the future, palpitating like a green butterfly on the hot sidewalk.

  Billie Jimmie sighed, gazing at Lucius. He could never repay that good old man, not only for the money but for the dignity he had been granted, the solitude in which to stoop to pick it up. He had been sober ever since, he said, all thanks to R. B. Chicken, and had been restored as a spiritual leader of his people. “He is a very good old man,” Billie Jimmie said fervently. “A very good old man. He is not honored in the white man’s world the way he should be.”

  Ernestine Thompson had told Lucius to talk with her cousin Bill if he wanted their family to sign his petition. Hurrying back to Chokoloskee, he went straight to the marina, where through the slat windows of a wide-load trailer, he discovered the corpus of Bill Smallwood lumped on his sofa. Beyond the sofa stood a TV screen, fuzzed white by the hard sunlight through the metal blinds. Knocking again without much result, he rattled the aluminum door, and finally Smallwood sat up slowly, overweight and wheezing. “Who’s that?” he growled, putting his straw hat on. Surly, he tottered toward the door and peered out through the screen as he tucked his shirt in. “Godamighty! Will you look at that pathetical old coot! I sure do hate to think what I must look like when I see ol’ Colonel lookin poor as that!”

  Bill opened the door and came outside and they shook hands. “Been expectin you and I don’t know why,” he said, “except one time I was married to the sister of that feller where you was at yesterday. You a tourist these days, Colonel? Come to have a look at Smallwood’s store? You tourists always want a look at the old store.” Doggedly sour even when Lucius laughed, Smallwood peered around him at the day. “Well, it sure looks like Sunday, don’t it? Wilma’s off to church, unless hell froze over. Keeps the store tight closed on Sundays, which would of been a sacrilege to our dad. Maybe he’ll forgive her when she gets to heaven, maybe not—depends. But you being the famous history writer, I might pry the door.”

  Bill Smallwood hadn’t changed a bit, he was ornery as ever, with the same ironic turn of mind as his cousin Andy. But while Andy’s irony was gentle and laconic, Bill’s was almost always harsh and mordant. “You want me to sign your damned petition? That why you’re creeping around pesterin everybody? Well, I don’t reckon I will do it, Colonel. They can’t burn that place down too soon for me.”

  The two walked slowly up the white shell road. What was left of Ted Smallwood’s land had been broken up into a small trailer park, a motel, and a marina, and Lucius supposed Bill was aware that he had not set foot on that store property since 1910 and might feel some reluctance even now. “You might not remember our old place too good,” Cap’n Bill reflected.

  They passed the Blue Heron Motel. “Andy’s in there hobnobbin with my younger sister. She runs the motel. You already talked to Ernestine, I heard, but I bet you ain’t talked to young Ned. Might not care to. Ned’ll take for you or he’ll take agin you. He missed out on my sunny disposition. No trouble to find him if you want him, but you might decide you don’t.

  “Course you never heard me say none of this stuff. I’m the oldest male in the Smallwood clan, so I’m bound to get in trouble if I talk too much.” He shook his head, dyspeptic. “Don’t look like I’ll kick up trouble too much longer. Got me a cancer of the exhaust system, y’know. They made a expedition up in there, took something out, I don’t know what; I told ’em they were more’n welcome to anything they come across.” He winced without self-pity. “The less I know about what’s happening back there, the better. Course my innards work somewhat different now than the way God rigged ’em, but I’m gettin used to it even if God ain’t. A man can get used to pret’ near anything, I guess, if life is worth it to him. Got to go runnin to the hospital every two minutes, get up on a cold steel table to get probed and fingered and slapped around like an ol’ piece of dead meat, so I ain’t made up my mind about that last part.”

  Bill Smallwood stopped to get his breath. “We heard you was still asking around about the whys and wherefores of what happened that day down here on the landing—same questions you asked back in the twenties! Well, I’m warnin you, Colonel, snoopin ain’t a good idea even today.”

  “I asked questions, all right,” Lucius agreed, “but nobody was answering.”

  Bill Smallwood grunted once and changed the subject. Mr. Watson’s fourth son by his final marriage, he said, had come here from north Florida some years ago. “Big feller. Housepainter. Don’t go by the name Watson, but hinted who he was. Never knew nothing much about his daddy, so I let on how E. J. Watson was a famous planter in these parts and let it go at that. Figured that’s what the man had come to hear.”

  “Addison Burdett?”

  Smallwood’s expression closed. “I never caught the name. All I know is, he shows up with a whole car full of paint and a big supply of grub. This was not long after the Park took over, they was already talking about burnin down every last shack in the Islands. I run this man to Chatham Bend and dropped him off. He was real nervous about varmints, gators especially—nervous about everything! He was pecking at his grub all the way down there, had the most of it already et by the time I set him on the bank!

  “Well, that house looked all gray and busted, jungled over. Hunters and such had left everything a mess, and the place stunk like a bear den. This man decided to sleep out on the porch. Says, ‘Wish me luck,’ by which he meant no diamondbacks nor scorpions nor panthers. But I knew what would plague him most was the miskeeters, cause the porch screens was all storm-torn, shot to hell. I sure hope you won’t need no sleep, I told him. Uncle Bill House used to say them skeeters on the Watson Place was the worst he come across in all his years out in the Glades. Said he had to chaw a whole plug of Brown Mule to fight ’em off.

  “I went back for that housepainter four days later. Naturally he was half-crazy from bad dreams and bug bites, but damn if he don’t have that paint job finished! Even knowing what that man was up to, when I come around the point and seen that house, I let out a whoop he could hear over my engine. The Watson Place weren’t gray no more, she was settin up there on her mound so fresh and white, looked like a castle! That’s what I told him when I hit the bank, and he give me some kind of a grin, but even that grin looked like he was hurtin.

  “So I said, ‘Boy, I sure do hate to see so much good oil paint wasted on a house that Parks aims to set afire before the year is out.’ And he told me he wanted folks to know that the Watsons had pride in their old home, no matter what. Said this was all he could think up to do to pay his daddy his respects. On the way back up the coast, he said that maybe if the old place looked like new, Parks might think twice about burnin her down. ‘Nosir,’ I said, ‘cause them damned feds don’t never think at all, let alone twice. Don’t want to waste their good time thinkin, with so much stupidity just a-cryin to be done.’ But this feller was smarter than I thought, cause that was some few year
s ago, and Parks ain’t burned her.

  “At Chokoloskee, he got right into his car. I said, ‘Come back and chew the fat another day, cause I’ll be thinkin up some more nice lies about E. J. Watson.’ And he don’t give me so much as a smile, just shakes his head and says, ‘I won’t be back.’ ”

  Bill Smallwood stopped dead in the road, still troubled by the flatness of that statement. “Leavin a place, a man’s heart might tell him that he won’t never get back there in this life. He was the first I ever heard admit it. Very very peculiar kind of feller.” He wheezed a little more and resumed walking.

  “Has he come back? Cap Brown just told me—”

  “Showed up here a few days ago, Ol’ Won’t-Be-Back himself! Same old ugly car, same carload of white housepaint and big yeller junk-food packets! Piled the whole mess into one of my skiffs, said he didn’t need to pay no guide, said he reckoned he knew the way now by himself. I hollered, ‘How about my boat? You know anythin about boats?’ And he sings out, ‘Heck, yes, Mr. Smallwood! I seen people boatin on the Lakes!’ ”

  Bill Smallwood shuddered. “ ‘Lakes!’ ” he grumbled. “So I give him a chart, showed him how to read it, warned him not to tear her bottom out on no damn orster bars, and pushed him off. If that fool ever made it, he’s on the Bend right now, slappin the paint to that old place just like before.”

  Ernestine Thompson had mentioned to Bill that the housepainter’s sister had visited there, too. “Said the sister was real sweet and friendly. Well, her brother might been sweet but he sure weren’t friendly. Hell of a good painter, though, you got to give him that.” He shook his head. “Funny thing how a brother and sister would get a notion to find out about their daddy, come all the way down here in their later age and ask their questions, then go on home to the same town and never even tell each other that they went!”

  Smallwood peered at Lucius as if to descry whether queer behavior might not be endemic in the Watson family. “His bunch changed their names after they left here, and we was noticin you done that, too, least on your history book. You ashamed of your daddy?” When Lucius denied this and explained the pen name, Bill just grunted. “None of my damned business, Colonel. All I know is I’d never change my name, no matter what. I was borned right here and raised right here, and raised my children, too. I couldn’t never answer to no name except Bill Smallwood.”

  A thick strangler fig and the old cistern were all that remained of the hurricane-battered homestead where the Smallwood and Watson children and their mothers had huddled and wept during the shooting. “Our old house had the store on the ground floor,” Smallwood was saying. “Three windows on the second floor, three bedrooms. That’s where Mama put the Widow Watson and her children. Ground floor in front had a long porch with high dark skinny chairs, case you don’t remember. Walk up some steps and cross that porch, go in the front door to the trading post, had a real long counter. But them steps weren’t nearly high enough to keep the Gulf out, not in the Great Hurricane of 1910.

  “Dad had his ditch dug from the bay side right up to the store so’s the Injun dugouts could unload the furs and gator hides onto his dock, all set to trade.” He pointed out a leaning shed in the undergrowth close to the boat ways. “That’s where we stored tomatoes and some produce before it was loaded on the boats bound for Key West.”

  A clearing on the Bay was set about with palms and sea grape, buttonwood, tall coco palms, and airy casuarina. “Weren’t none of these Australian pines back in your daddy’s day, nor this store neither.” He pointed at the barn-red building high on posts under the trees, with a steep stair to the second-story entrance. Above the door was a faded sign, SMALLWOOD’S STORE AND POST OFFICE. “People are still reading in their magazines and books where Watson died inside of that red buildin, or under that red buildin, or on this open shore on the east side. But he was buried seven years before this store was built, and the buildin weren’t raised up this way till just before the Hurricane of ’26. Wilma tried to set them writers straight, and tourists, too, but all she ever done was disappoint ’em.”

  Lucius nodded. “A picturesque old store would illustrate their story, so they changed the story.”

  “That’s about it. Don’t want nothin to do with the hard truth, no more’n the rest of us. Anyways, Wilma give up on the truth, cause she seen that truth was very bad for business.” Smallwood gave a small pained grunt which was as close to mirth as he could manage. He turned back toward the building and climbed the stairs, fuming and puffing, clutching the railing at the top. “Call this exercise! Don’t make a damn bit of difference if I get exercised or not, you’re lookin at a feller might be dead next year!” He rummaged a padlock on the door. With his back to Lucius, he paused and said, “Ever think about that, Colonel? Death, I mean?” Without waiting for an answer—it was not a question—Smallwood pushed the door open and went inside.

  At the far end of the dark room shone a bright rectangle where a rear door opened on a second-story balcony over the water. In the light from both ends, the store took a dim shape. The inventory of E. J. Watson’s day was still in place. The dusty shelves, Lucius realized, could offer nothing to those visitors who arrived over the causeway—no camera film or sunburn lotion, no sunglasses, no souvenir T-shirts, no bright postcards. Instead it catered to the old spare needs of local customers—dry goods and staples, canned foods and lard, turpentine and linseed oil, storm lanterns, kerosene, paint, rope, boots, buckets, burlap, barrels, cook pots, kettles, pans. Over all was a stale mousy smell and a dry moan of wasps, from the white nests plastered hard to the bare rafters.

  Bill Smallwood dug out ancient ledgers and spread them on the counter, inviting Lucius to inspect Watson accounts—grits at five dollars a barrel, venison and bacon at seven cents a pound. For coffee, the green beans in a sack were beaten up fine with a marlin spike. Grated cassava and ground coontie roots dug in the piney woods inland supplied the starch. Lard tubs were saved for keeping matches and tobacco dry out in the boats, and spare clothes, too. Almost everything had found a use, nothing was wasted.

  Smallwood dragged a canvas boat chair out onto the balcony over the water. In the corner leaned a bamboo fish pole with a piece of clam dried hard as yellow wood on its rusty hook. White bits of broken shellfish baits lay scattered in the cracks of the weathered deck. “I bet them ol’ baits been there since I was little.” Smallwood sighed. He patted a rust-locked gas pump that in other days had served the boats by gravity feed. “Runboats coming in to pick up mullet brought our gasoline and kerosene and oil, maybe fifty drums. My dad had a hoist rigged up, to lift ’em.” Bill Smallwood nodded at this memory, resting quietly in the bay heat, gazing out over the channels between oyster bars where the fishing boats of long ago had anchored. Most of the old-time boats were white, he reminded Lucius, with bright blue trim along the gunwales and the red copper of the bottom paint showing along the waterline.

  “Red, white, and blue. Don’t know if them boats was patriotic-meant, but they sure looked cheerful,” Smallwood said, not cheered much by the memory. “Them were the cheerful days, all right, all but that one.” His slow arm rose to point across the glittering gray water. “See where I’m pointin at? Them real high trees where that dogleg channel off Rabbit Key Pass comes out back of them bars? Hard to make out sunken bars in the late dusk, so not all of ’em would try it, but that’s the way your dad come in on that October evenin. Come north on the Gulf far as Rabbit Key, cause the inside channels was all choked with broken trees after that storm. East up the Pass, took a ‘ninety’ north up that short channel, follered it around them bars and clumps and on in to our landing.

  “Course I was only a little boy and don’t recall much, but I have listened all about that evenin over and over. The men was strung along this shore, right below where we are sittin at this minute, and the rest was back up there by the old store.”

  Lucius imagined Billy Smallwood and Little Ad Burdett, at play in the old store back from the water. Those quick lit
tle boys in their noisy play, forever running—who could have foretold the heavy dour men they would become?

  All around this south end of the Bay, white egrets were pinned like ornaments on high green walls of the encircling trees. The view of the shoreline and the open water which his father had crossed on his last evening on earth brought Lucius a cavernous sorrow even now. Though he had learned all—or almost all—the details, he found his father’s final minutes unimaginable. Why he had returned at all was a true mystery. Surely it could not have been simply to celebrate Kate Edna’s birthday! The other unknown was the terrible miscalculation—if such it was—which had brought down on him that dreadful crash of fire, the burning blows of volley after volley, the long falling to earth, the staring end.

  “Nobody said a word when it was over,” Smallwood was saying. “Some men took their hats off, my dad said, but they put ’em right back on when others growled at ’em. Pretty soon, the men who done it went off in the dark, just shadows in the trees, then they were gone. My dad come down here to the shore, straightened him out a little, crossed his arms, y’know. Toward daylight, a few men come back, hauled the body out to Rabbit Key.”